How Stay Useful articles are researched and maintained

What Stay Useful is for

Stay Useful exists to help people who are not AI specialists understand where they stand with AI at work: how exposed their work is, how to use these tools well and safely, and how to become more valuable as the tools improve.

The guides are the free, public part of that. They are written to answer the question that brought a reader here, completely, whether or not that reader ever takes the free assessment or buys anything.

Who writes the guides

Guides carry a Stay Useful organisational byline rather than a named expert, because that is the truthful description. They are researched, written and reviewed by the small team behind Stay Useful, which is Avenir AI Limited, a New Zealand company.

We do not attach credentials we do not hold, and we do not invent reviewers. If a guide is later checked by a qualified external reviewer, it will say so by name and date on the guide itself.

Stay Useful may use AI tools to assist with research and drafting, in the same way the guides recommend using them for suitable work. Before publication a person at Stay Useful reads and edits each guide, and important factual claims are checked against the original or an authoritative source, which is linked wherever it is useful.

We do not claim independent expert, legal, privacy or security review of a guide unless the guide says so, by name and date.

How a guide is researched

Before a guide is written we research what people who search for its question actually want to know, and read the sources that are able to answer it.

Primary sources come first: research from bodies such as the International Labour Organization, the OECD, national statistics agencies, regulators such as the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, and peer-reviewed or working-paper research from universities. Where a guide describes how a particular AI product handles data, the description is based on that provider's own documentation as it read on the review date shown on the guide, and the guide says which product and which setting it is describing.

Research published by companies with a commercial interest in the result is used sparingly and is labelled as company research. News coverage is used to find a source, not as the source.

Statistics are stated with enough context to be understood: what was measured, where, when, and whether it is exposure, a forecast, a survey answer or an observed change. Where credible sources disagree, the guide says so rather than choosing the tidier number.

What we will not do

• Invent a study, a statistic, a quotation, a person or a source.
• Present research by someone else as research by Stay Useful.
• Predict that a profession will disappear, or promise that a course of action protects a job.
• Publish a guide whose purpose is to rank rather than to answer.
• Hide the sources a guide relies on, or link to a summary when the original is available and useful.

Frameworks and interpretation

Some guides include a framework, checklist or decision tool created by Stay Useful. These are labelled as Stay Useful frameworks. They are our interpretation of the evidence, offered to help a reader think through their own situation, and they are not research findings in themselves.

Dates and updates

Every guide shows three dates. The published date never changes. The updated date moves only when the content changes materially. The last-reviewed date records when the facts and sources were last checked, which can happen without a change to the text.

We do not change dates to make a guide look newer than it is. Articles may be updated when the information in them changes materially, and where that happens we aim to note what changed on the guide.

Corrections

If you find an error, a source that no longer says what a guide says it does, or a provider policy that has changed, write to support@stayuseful.co.nz with the guide's address and what you found. Corrections that change the meaning of a guide are noted on the guide.

What the guides are not

The guides are general information. They are not legal, financial, employment or privacy advice for your specific situation, and they cannot know your employer's policies or your contract. Where a question depends on the law where you live or work, the guide says so.

How the guides relate to what Stay Useful sells

Stay Useful offers a free self-assessment and sells the Stay Useful AI Work Kit, a paid set of files. The guides link to the free assessment where it is a genuine next step, and occasionally mention the kit. A guide is written to be complete and useful on its own first. If a guide ever reads like an advertisement, that is a defect, and we would like to hear about it.